The Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner has absorbed enough oppo research to kill half a dozen healthy candidacies. Among the stream of revelations, Platner has called himself a Communist, hinted at political violence, labeled all cops bastards, broadly described rural white people as racist and stupid, downplayed sexual assault, and mocked gay people.
He recently covered and apologized for a skull-and-crossbones tattoo associated with the Nazi SS, claiming he hadn’t been aware of its political connotations. There is a famous comedy sketch in which an SS officer, finally noticing in the final stages of war that SS caps feature “little pictures of skulls,” is moved to wonder: “Are we the baddies?” The joke is that it took until 1945 for this Nazi to grasp the symbolism of the death’s-head logo. Yet Platner spent 18 years blissfully unaware of the implications of the symbol inked on his torso.
Platner is toughing it out, as scandal-plagued candidates almost always do. What’s surprising is that his supporters appear completely unfazed by the bad-news avalanche. Rather than abandon his candidacy, or even back off slightly until they’ve seen the end of the damaging stories, they have accepted his apologies and backed him to the hilt.
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